High Spatial Resolution Mapping of Dykes Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) Photogrammetry: New Insights On Emplacement Processes

Remote sensing has played a pivotal role in our understanding of the geometry of dykes and dyke swarms on Earth,Venus and Mars(West and Ernst,1991;Mege and Masson,1995;Ernst et al.,2005).Since the 1970’s

Review of Effective Vegetation Mapping Using the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) Method

We tried more precise mapping of vegetation using UAV?(unmanned aerial vehicle), as a new method of creating vegetation maps, and we?objected to be clearly the efficient mapping of vegetation using the UAV method by comparing vegetation maps created by analysing aerial photographs taken by a UAV and an aircraft (manned flight). The aerial photography using UAV was conducted in the Niida River estuary (the secondary river flowing into Minamisoma City in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan). The photography period was in August 2013. We analysed the aerial photographs using ArcGis 9 (Esri Japan Corporation, Tokyo, Japan). The aerial photographs of the main plant communities (Phragmites australis,?Typha domingensis, and?Miscanthus sacchariflorus) taken by the UAV could clearly discriminate each plant community at the 1/50 scale. Moreover, it could clearly discriminate the shape of a plant at the 1/10 scale. We compared the vegetation maps by analysing the aerial photos taken by a UAV (2013 shooting) and an aircraft (2011 shooting). As a result, the vegetation map created by the UAV method could clearly discriminate community distributions. We conclude that vegetation surveys using UAV are possible and are capable of a highly precise community division in places where field reconnaissance is difficult. The UAV method is effective and will contribute to the improvement of research methods in the future;this method may reduce research costs associated with a reduction in field survey days and man-power.

Winter Wheat Crop Height Estimation Using Small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS)

Deploying the small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) for data collection of high-resolution images is a big potential in determining crop physiological parameters. The advantage of using sUAS technology is the ability to acquire a high-resolution orthophoto and a 3D Model which is highly suitable for plant height monitoring. Plant height estimation has a big impact in the growth and development of wheat because it is essential for obtaining biomass, which is a factor for higher crop yield. Plant height is an indicator of high yield estimation and it correlates to biomass, nitrogen content, and other plant growth parameters. The study is aimed to determine an accurate height of wheat using the sUAS generated Digital Surface Model (DSM). A high-resolution imagery between 1.0 - 1.2 cm/pixel was obtained from a 35 m altitude with area coverage of 1.01 hectares. The DSM and orthophoto were generated from the sUAS, and the computed wheat heights were derived from the difference of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and DSM data. Field measurement using steel tape was done for ground truth. The sUAS-based wheat height data were evaluated using the ground truth of 66 wheat-rows by applying correlation and linear regression analysis. Datasets were collected from three different flight campaigns (March 2018-May 2018). The sUAS-based wheat height data were significantly correlated, obtaining the result of R2 = 0.988, R2 = 0.996 and R2 = 0.944 for the month of March, April and May 2018 respectively. The significance of linear regression results was also validated by computing for the p-value. The p-value results were 0.00064, 0.0000824 and 0.0058 respectively. The main concern is the lodging of winter wheat, especially during the month of April which affects the recording of the plant’s height. Because some of the wheat plants are now lying on the ground, so measurements are done vertically. Nonetheless, the results showed that sUAS technology is highly suitable for many agricultural applications.

Central Command Architecture for High-Order Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems

This paper is the first in a two-part series that introduces an easy-to-implement central command architecture for high-order autonomous unmanned aerial systems. This paper discusses the development and the second paper presents the flight test results. As shown in this paper, the central command architecture consists of a central command block, an autonomous planning block, and an autonomous flight controls block. The central command block includes a staging process that converts an objective into tasks independent of the vehicle (agent). The autonomous planning block contains a non-iterative sequence of algorithms that govern routing, vehicle assignment, and deconfliction. The autonomous flight controls block employs modern controls principles, dividing the control input into a guidance part and a regulation part. A novel feature of high-order central command, as this paper shows, is the elimination of operator-directed vehicle tasking and the manner in which deconfliction is treated. A detailed example illustrates different features of the architecture.

A new robust fuzzy method for unmanned flying vehicle control

A new general robust fuzzy approach was presented to control the position and the attitude of unmanned flying vehicles(UFVs). Control of these vehicles was challenging due to their nonlinear underactuated behaviors. The proposed control system combined great advantages of generalized indirect adaptive sliding mode control(IASMC) and fuzzy control for the UFVs. An on-line adaptive tuning algorithm based on Lyapunov function and Barbalat lemma was designed, thus the stability of the system can be guaranteed. The chattering phenomenon in the sliding mode control was reduced and the steady error was also alleviated. The numerical results, for an underactuated quadcopter and a high speed underwater vehicle as case studies, indicate that the presented adaptive design of fuzzy sliding mode controller performs robustly in the presence of sensor noise and external disturbances. In addition, online unknown parameter estimation of the UFVs, such as ground effect and planing force especially in the cases with the Gaussian sensor noise with zero mean and standard deviation of 0.5 m and 0.1 rad and external disturbances with amplitude of 0.1 m/s2 and frequency of 0.2 Hz, is one of the advantages of this method. These estimated parameters are then used in the controller to improve the trajectory tracking performance.

Small objects detection in UAV aerial images based on improved Faster R-CNN

In order to solve the problem of small objects detection in unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)aerial images with complex background,a general detection method for multi-scale small objects based on Faster region-based convolutional neural network(Faster R-CNN)is proposed.The bird’s nest on the high-voltage tower is taken as the research object.Firstly,we use the improved convolutional neural network ResNet101 to extract object features,and then use multi-scale sliding windows to obtain the object region proposals on the convolution feature maps with different resolutions.Finally,a deconvolution operation is added to further enhance the selected feature map with higher resolution,and then it taken as a feature mapping layer of the region proposals passing to the object detection sub-network.The detection results of the bird’s nest in UAV aerial images show that the proposed method can precisely detect small objects in aerial images.

Submarine Hunter: Efficient and Secure Multi-Type Unmanned Vehicles

Utilizing artificial intelligence(AI)to protect smart coastal cities has become a novel vision for scientific and industrial institutions.One of these AI technologies is using efficient and secure multi-environment Unmanned Vehicles(UVs)for anti-submarine attacks.This study’s contribution is the early detection of a submarine assault employing hybrid environment UVs that are controlled using swarm optimization and secure the information in between UVs using a decentralized cybersecurity strategy.The Dragonfly Algorithm is used for the orientation and clustering of the UVs in the optimization approach,and the Re-fragmentation strategy is used in the Network layer of the TCP/IP protocol as a cybersecurity solution.The research’s noteworthy findings demonstrate UVs’logistical capability to promptly detect the target and address the problem while securely keeping the drone’s geographical information.The results suggest that detecting the submarine early increases the likelihood of averting a collision.The dragonfly strategy of sensing the position of the submersible and aggregating around it demonstrates the reliability of swarm intelligence in increasing access efficiency.Securing communication between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs)improves the level of secrecy necessary for the task.The swarm navigation is based on a peer-to-peer system,which allows each UAV to access information from its peers.This,in turn,helps the UAVs to determine the best route to take and to avoid collisions with other UAVs.The dragonfly strategy also increases the speed of the mission by minimizing the time spent finding the target.

Improved Weighted Local Contrast Method for Infrared Small Target Detection

In order to address the problem of high false alarm rate and low probabilities of infrared small target detection in complex low-altitude background,an infrared small target detection method based on improved weighted local contrast is proposed in this paper.First,the ratio information between the target and local background is utilized as an enhancement factor.The local contrast is calculated by incorporating the heterogeneity between the target and local background.Then,a local product weighted method is designed based on the spatial dissimilarity between target and background to further enhance target while suppressing background.Finally,the location of target is obtained by adaptive threshold segmentation.As experimental results demonstrate,the method shows superior performance in several evaluation metrics compared with six existing algorithms on different datasets containing targets such as unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV).

Online Multi-Object Tracking Under Moving Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Platform Based on Object Detection and Feature Extraction Network

In order to solve the problem of small object size and low detection accuracy under the unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)platform,the object detection algorithm based on deep aggregation network and high-resolution fusion module is studied.Furthermore,a joint network of object detection and feature extraction is studied to construct a real-time multi-object tracking algorithm.For the problem of object association failure caused by UAV movement,image registration is applied to multi-object tracking and a camera motion discrimination model is proposed to improve the speed of the multi-object tracking algorithm.The simulation results show that the algorithm proposed in this study can improve the accuracy of multi-object tracking under the UAV platform,and effectively solve the problem of association failure caused by UAV movement.

Bearing-only Visual SLAM for Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in GPS-denied Environments

This paper presents a hierarchical simultaneous localization and mapping（SLAM） system for a small unmanned aerial vehicle（UAV） using the output of an inertial measurement unit（IMU） and the bearing-only observations from an onboard monocular camera.A homography based approach is used to calculate the motion of the vehicle in 6 degrees of freedom by image feature match.This visual measurement is fused with the inertial outputs by an indirect extended Kalman filter（EKF） for attitude and velocity estimation.Then,another EKF is employed to estimate the position of the vehicle and the locations of the features in the map.Both simulations and experiments are carried out to test the performance of the proposed system.The result of the comparison with the referential global positioning system/inertial navigation system（GPS/INS） navigation indicates that the proposed SLAM can provide reliable and stable state estimation for small UAVs in GPS-denied environments.

Gradient Descent Algorithm for Small UAV Parameter Estimation System

A gradient descent algorithm with adjustable parameter for attitude estimation is developed,aiming at the attitude measurement for small unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)in real-time flight conditions.The accelerometer and magnetometer are introduced to construct an error equation with the gyros,thus the drifting characteristics of gyroscope can be compensated by solving the error equation utilized by the gradient descent algorithm.Performance of the presented algorithm is evaluated using a self-proposed micro-electro-mechanical system(MEMS)based attitude heading reference system which is mounted on a tri-axis turntable.The on-ground,turntable and flight experiments indicate that the estimation attitude has a good accuracy.Also,the presented system is compared with an open-source flight control system which runs extended Kalman filter(EKF),and the results show that the attitude control system using the gradient descent method can estimate the attitudes for UAV effectively.

Low Altitude Satellite Constellation for Futuristic Aerial-Ground Communications

This paper discusses the significance and prospects of low altitude small satellite aerial vehicles to ensure smooth aerial-ground communications for next-generation broadband networks.To achieve the generic goals of fifthgeneration and beyondwireless networks,the existing aerial network architecture needs to be revisited.The detailed architecture of low altitude aerial networks and the challenges in resource management have been illustrated in this paper.Moreover,we have studied the coordination between promising communication technologies and low altitude aerial networks to provide robust network coverage.We talk about the techniques that can ensure userfriendly control and monitoring of the low altitude aerial networks to bring forth wireless broadband connectivity to a new dimension.In the end,we highlight the future research directions of aerial-ground communications in terms of access technologies,machine learning,compressed sensing,and quantum communications.

MFE-YOLOX:无人机航拍下密集小目标检测算法

针对无人机航拍时物体尺度变化大,检测目标大多较小且物体较密集的问题,提出一种混合特征增强结构(mix feature enhancement, MFE)方法。通过在超分辨率方法中加入注意力机制以增强小目标信息提取,利用一种新的特征层融合计算方法,加强不同特征层间的融合效率,提高了中小型目标的检测精度;设计了尾端感受野扩大层以扩大尾端特征层感受野,使检测头可接收丰富的物体信息来定位并区分密集物体。实验在数据集VisDrone2021的测试集上进行测试,MFE-YOLOX网络的AP50结果为47.78%,在参数量、计算量与原网络相近的情况下精度提高了9.43个百分点。

基于上下文信息与特征细化的无人机小目标检测算法

无人机航拍图像中的目标检测是近年来研究的热点,针对无人机视角下目标小而密集、背景复杂导致检测精度低的问题,提出一种基于上下文信息与特征细化的无人机小目标检测算法。通过上下文特征增强模块,利用多尺度扩张卷积捕获与周围区域像素点的潜在关系,为网络补充上下文信息,并根据不同尺度的特征层自适应生成各层级特征图的输出权重,动态优化特征图表达能力;由于不同特征图细粒度不同,使用特征细化模块来抑制特征融合中冲突信息的干扰,防止小目标特征淹没在冲突信息中;设计了一种带权重的损失函数,加快模型收敛速度,进一步提高小目标检测精度。在VisDrone2021数据集进行大量实验表明,改进后的模型较基准模型mAP50提高8.4个百分点,mAP50:95提高5.9个百分点,FPS为42,有效提高了无人机航拍图像中小目标的检测精度。

无人机作业参数对苹果树雾滴沉积分布的影响

为了研究植保无人飞机在苹果果树雾滴分布的情况,选用韦加JF01-20电动八旋翼四轴植保无人机作为测试平台,探讨飞行速度和喷雾助剂对于苹果果树雾滴分布的影响。试验设定了6组试验处理,以水敏纸为雾滴分布测试工具,分别布置在果树的上中下冠层,统计果树立体冠层的雾滴分布数据。研究结果表明:果树相同冠层水平面的雾滴分布差异性较大,雾滴分布的变异系数值范围在49.1%~227.6%之间变化;雾滴的分布数值结果在果树冠层从上至下逐步降低,雾滴分布的数值结果随着飞行速度的增加而降低,各雾滴测试指标的变化趋势相同;添加助剂后,各个试验处理以及冠层间的雾滴分布结果具有显著的提升。研究结果可为植保无人飞机应用于苹果果树的喷洒提供数据支持。

高阶深度可分离无人机图像小目标检测算法

当前无人机图像中存在小目标数量众多、背景复杂的特点,目标检测中易造成漏检误检率较高的问题,针对这些问题,提出一种高阶深度可分离无人机图像小目标检测算法.首先,结合CSPNet结构与ConvMixer网络,深度可分离卷积核,获取梯度结合信息,并引入递归门控卷积C3模块,提升模型的高阶空间交互能力,增强网络对小目标的敏感度;其次,检测头采用两个头部进行解耦,分别输出特征图分类和位置信息,加快模型收敛速度;最后,使用边框损失函数EIoU,提高检测框精准度.在VisDrone2019数据集上的实验结果表明,该模型检测精度达到了35.1%,模型漏检率和误检率有明显下降,能够有效地应用于无人机图像小目标检测任务.在DOTA 1.0数据集和HRSID数据集上进行模型泛化能力测试,实验结果表明,该模型具有良好的鲁棒性.

采用局部-全局区域重检测机制的无人机长期跟踪算法

为解决基础跟踪器面对遮挡和移出视野等长期跟踪场景时易出现跟踪失败等问题,提出了一种基于局部-全局区域重检测的无人机长期跟踪算法。设计了基础滤波器,将高置信度样本与其结合,并融入自适应时空正则化,解决了滤波器退化问题,提高了模型鲁棒性以及复杂场景下的性能;优化了滤波器更新策略,通过评价跟踪结果进行自适应更新;设计快速尺度滤波器,解决了跟踪过程中的尺度变化问题;设计了局部-全局区域重检测机制,跟踪失败时启动重检测器恢复跟踪目标,先完成局部区域重检测,若恢复跟踪失败,再利用全局区域重检测器继续恢复目标跟踪状态。实验结果表明:所提算法在UAV20L数据集上的精确度和准确率分别可达0.724和0.621,与基于时空正则化相关滤波器的跟踪算法(STRCF)相比分别提升了25.9%和20.6%,与同类主流算法相比,跟踪效果得到提升,证明了算法的有效性。

水下无人航行器高速航行下的运动特性及仿真控制研究

水下无人航行器具有水下活动范围大、机动性好优点,主要用于大范围地形地貌勘探,水下高速长航程航行时,水下航行器运动特性和姿态控制是研究重点。本文建立水下航行器垂直面航行运动模型,分析高速航行下的运动特性。为保证高速航行高效稳定,提出PID方法控制纵倾和滑模方法控制深度的组合控制策略。通过仿真试验,开展高速航行运动仿真研究。研究结果表明,在高速航行下,水下航行器会产生一定纵倾,且随着航速增加,纵倾影响会越大,高速状态放大了水下航行器外形上下轻微不对称的特性,诱导产生的垂向水动力及力矩增大,进而引起纵倾;在高速航行条件下,水下航行器能稳定保持定深度长距离航行,控制策略具有很好的适用性。

基于改进YOLOv5s的无人机小目标检测算法

为了解决传统目标检测算法对无人机(UAV)航拍小目标存在错漏检严重的问题,提出基于YOLOv5的无人机小目标检测算法FDB-YOLO.在YOLOv5的基础上增加小目标检测层,优化特征融合网络,充分利用网络浅层小目标细粒信息,提升网络感知能力;提出损失函数FPIoU,通过充分利用锚框的几何性质,采用四点位置偏置约束函数,优化锚框定位,加快损失函数收敛速度;采用结合注意力机制的动态目标检测头(DyHead),通过增加尺度、空间、任务感知提升算法检测能力;在特征提取部分引入双级路由注意力机制(BRA),通过有选择性地对相关区域进行计算,过滤无关区域,提升模型的检测精确度.实验证明,在VisDrone2019数据集上,本算法与YOLOv5s目标检测算法相比,精确率提升了3.7个百分点,召回率提升了5.1个百分点,mAP50增加了5.8个百分点,mAP_(50∶95)增加3.4个百分点,并且相比当前主流算法而言都有更加优秀的表现.

基于自抗扰方法的无人机控制律设计

针对多平台、多任务的无人机飞行控制律的快速开发问题,提出一种基于自抗扰方法的无人机控制律架构,设计了可复用的扩展状态观测器及微分跟踪器,研究对比了其在3种具有较大差异的无人机平台中的应用,使7 000 kg的超音速UAV_A获得了更优的敏捷性结果,在60 kg的缩比UAV_B完成了5.8g的半滚倒转大过载机动飞行试验,基于10 kg的平直翼UAV_C实现了12架机紧编队的精确轨迹控制飞行试验。仿真及试飞结果表明:所提自抗扰控制结构响应快速、控制精度高、鲁棒性强,能够较好地适应多类无人机、面向多种任务场景的控制需求,且不需调参就能够获得较好的控制效果,为飞行控制算法设计提供了新的技术途径。